Author: Jamie Hailstone, New Start

In the last few years, crowdfunding has become an established and successful way of raising money for anything from craft beer to the latest smart phone apps.

However, crowdfunding can also be used to support community projects, not only by raising money in the first instance, but also by unlocking other forms of match funding, like local authority and public sector grants.

A new report by Nesta looks at the growing phenomenon of ‘matched crowdfunding’, and highlights a pilot programme where £251,500 in matched funding from the Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Fund inspired crowdfunding donations of more than £400,000.

During the nine-month trial, the website www.crowdfunder.co.uk provided an online platform for community groups to launch their ideas.

The £251,500 match funding was then distributed to 59 projects around the country, who also benefitted from ongoing support, coaching and workshops all provided by the website.

‘The report makes a strong case for local authorities and other grant funding organisations to work with Crowdfunder,’ said the website’s managing director, Phil Geraghty.

‘We can match the UK’s £5.6bn grant money with crowd-raised funds. Importantly, the report outlines strong evidence for doing so.

‘Crowdfunder is now looking for more funders who have a collaborative approach, deep valuable knowledge of their sectors and a shared mission to tackle societal change by helping make ideas happen,’ he added.

The report found the pilot largely attracted new supporters and finance for arts and heritage organisations, rather than drawing from existing sources.

More than two in three of the fundraisers involved also reported that running the crowdfunding campaign significantly improved their pitching and fundraising skills.

And while crowdfunding can help fundraisers easily attract a global audience, in the majority of these cases backers lived less than 20 miles from the project they supported and the majority stated that they were going to see or experience the project in person.

The report recommends arts and heritage groups should explore using crowdfunding both as a fundraising and an engagement tool.

According to the report, crowdfunding is a good way of testing out demand and interest in ideas.

The report adds that the online nature of crowdfunding can also ‘increase transparency’ around what is getting funded, compared to other traditional forms of fund-raising.

Crowdfund London: The report highlights the partnership between the Greater London Authority and the Spacehive crowdfunding platform, which has given local groups a new way of raising funds and bringing projects to life.

Crowdfund London allows projects to gain the support of the wider community and the mayor of London, who uses the website to pledge funding of up to £50,0000 as ‘one of the crowd’.

The platform has now been running for four years and so far, more than 8,700 Londoners have pledged over £1.6m to 77 different campaigns.

These include the Well Street Community Food Market, the Community Brain Community Kitchen in Surbiton and a community art initiative in north London.

The Peckham Coal Line project raised £75,757 from 928 backers and received an additional £10,000 pledge from City Hall to explore how a disused railway track could be converted into an urban park.

According to the report, the fund found it helped ‘improve community cohesion and democratise the urban re-development process’, as well as opening up local government to the ‘wider and less-active section’ of the population.

Crowdfund Plymouth: In 2015, Plymouth council, in partnership with Crowdfunder, used £60,000 of the neighbourhood proportion of their community infrastructure levy (CIL) to setup the Crowdfund Plymouth match fund.

Now in its third year of operation, the fund has distributed £997,260, including more than £140k from the city in matches to projects in Plymouth.

These range from a campaign by the Plymouth Argyle Ladies Football Club to cover cost of kit and playing matches to Sole Discretion – a social enterprise seeking to protect the marine environment through the creation of a dedicated supply chain for ethically caught fish.

An evaluation of Crowdfund Plymouth found that most of the matched projects have taken in the city’s most disadvantaged areas, but that pledges have come from across the city and nationally.

Through this approach the council has sought to make best use of funds open to the community, reduce time and administration required to give out small grants, increase visibility of the fund and provide support to areas reach a new audience by supporting projects and people that would otherwise not have applied for funding.

‘We check Crowdfunder every week, and we’ve seen a lot of projects that wouldn’t have gone through the usual application route which is what we were aiming for,’ said the council’s neighbourhood planning manager, Hannah Sloggett.

‘They can be quite reactive – someone’s just seen a problem and they have set about fixing it. It creates an environment where local people can be supported to develop their own solutions to improving their communities in a supported way.

‘For people that aren’t used to putting funding applications in it can feel more accessible – they can put in a short film or just explain it as they would to their friends,’ she added

Read the full report here.

Author: Jonny Gordon- Farleigh

Where did the idea for the project come from?

 I’m the director of Stir to Action, which publishes the magazine Stir and also supports community economic development projects. A big part of that work is about looking at local assets and seeing how they can support local economic development. Whether it’s looking at how land could be used to grow food, how roofs could host renewables or under-used buildings could be used for community activities. In the Church of England network alone there are an estimated 16,000 churches nationally and many have dwindling congregations. These are unique local assets but many are struggling with high maintenance costs and a lack of income generation, with the buildings becoming a burden and a drain on resources. Journalist and writer Simon Jenkins described the network as the ‘nation’s grandest unexploited social resource’.

How will you help churches play a greater role in their local economies?

Our role is to help churches understand community economic development and how they could take on roles as community wealth builders. In recent years a huge movement has developed around community shops, halls and pubs, with communities in rural areas in particular responding to the decline of these local services by taking on the running of them. We would like to see churches become part of this movement by finding new ways to engage with their local communities while also creating revenues to help them survive. A report by the Plunkett Foundation, commissioned by the Heritage Lottery Fund, was published this year looking at the potential for social enterprise in rural churches. This is not about individual social entrepreneurs operating out of churches but about looking at how democratic forms of enterprise can help churches renew their social purpose. I believe we place too much emphasis on entrepreneurs but if you look at the history of the cooperative movement, it has had a huge influence on social movements in the UK and around the world. Co-operatives are about drawing large groups of people together and teaching them the skills to create and build organisations that have economic aims but are also much broader, focusing on the social and cultural aspects as much as on revenues.

What ideas do you have for how churches could become more enterprising?

A few years ago a church in Kent became the first to host a community bank in response to predatory lenders, and that’s an idea that could be replicated. Churches could become community hubs, with a wide range of activities taking place, or wellbeing centres with services dedicated to improving mental health. It’s about making the shift from a charitable approach to a more enterprising approach, but with the needs of the community at its heart.

How will you help enable churches to make the shift?

We are working with three churches in the southwest of England for this one-year pilot, funded by the Friends Provident Foundation. We will engage those churches and their local communities and help them to identify local needs and come up with ideas around how the church building could help fulfil those needs. We will offer training and workshops to help them launch co-operative organisations attached to the church. An important part of this process is co-production – based on the work and toolkit of social enterprise Learn to lead – that involves stakeholders in the process from the start. Alongside this, our three pilot communities will be supported by external consultants who are able to encourage local communities, import new ideas, facilitate consensus in an often divisive process, and offer the co-operative model as an option in their community economic development plans.

How much of a cultural shift is this?

Before the Victorian era churches were used for a wide variety of local services and were places of trade. Culture is slow to change but in many places a process of re-thinking the local role of churches is happening. This is not about monetising services that churches have run for free but about thinking how enterprise can be relevant to their vital work and creating fair business models to help churches continue that work. We plan to hold a one-day conference next year called From Conservation to Cooperation, which will bring together people interested in how the heritage sector as a whole can become more involved in community economic development.

Author: SCA

Discussion paper on a shift to demand-led public funding for communities

Background

When Derek Mackay, MSP was Communities Minister he showed a keen interest in the way that Scottish Government funds the community sector and in particular wanted to do something about the fact that it’s possible for a single community organisation to receive grant funding from several different parts of government (and even from within a single department from several different pots). Each grant requiring a separate application, with different reporting and monitoring requirements, different timeframes etc. Apart from the obvious inefficiencies of this system and the time and effort required of communities to comply with all the application and reporting requirements, this supply-led funding system also had the effect of distorting the activities and priorities of community groups. Typically, when a new fund is launched with a set of criteria for applicants to comply with, applicant organisations will often present themselves in whatever way is deemed to best fit with the criteria.

Although Derek Mackay, MSP is now Finance Minister, he has maintained an interest in this issue and has recently charged civil servants within Housing and Regeneration Division with the task of coming up with a better solution for funding our sector than the current system allows. Currently they are describing this work as developing an Umbrella Community Fund.

The Challenge

Work is underway to establish exactly where all the government funding to our sector comes from, it is clear that it is extremely wide ranging. The challenge is not so much how to conflate different funding ‘streams’ into one ‘raging torrent’ but how to design a funding system that is more strategic, less of a burden to communities, and makes best use of an ever decreasing pot.

If the current arrangements could be described as 100% supply-led (Scottish Government and other funders determining who gets how much and when – albeit with some input from sector reps who sit on a variety of funding panels), how could we reform the system so that it becomes more demand-led?

In the current policy climate which is characterised by a strong commitment to community led regeneration, local empowerment and more effective local democracy, it would seem like an appropriate moment to begin the redefine how public funding is delivered to the sector and, as a consequence, how these funders relates to our sector more generally.

Proposition

That we encourage the Scottish Government commit itself to moving towards a demand-led system of funding. This would require the Scottish Government to adopt an approach whereby it considers itself to be investing in communities (rather than creating funding opportunities) and in particular, investing in those priorities which have already been agreed by any given community. This model of funding would have many implications both for Scottish Government and recipient communities and therefore any shift towards it would have to be gradual and incremental. It would require communities to systematically develop local place plans that would identify their priorities across a wide range of potential areas of interest and need – what community facilities are required, the needs of young people, social care for the elderly, leisure facilities, housing needs, action to combat climate change, how the local economy might develop, land use issues etc . The extent of a community’s ambition or willingness to address certain issues would, in a sense, determine their eligibility to receive certain funds. The Scottish Government would only provide for example, Climate Challenge Funding, if the community has already identified as a priority, action on climate change. This would preclude the more opportunistic communities from applying for any new pot of funding that comes on stream. It would also require Scottish Government to become more strategic and joined up in the way that they approached the funding of our sector.

One of the many implications of this approach is the question of how communities are to be helped to prepare the local place plans which would be sufficiently comprehensive to attract the available funds. This approach would shift the emphasis away from application writing and towards comprehensive plan production. None of this will be easy. The question is, is this a direction of travel worth pursuing?

Note: It is likely that Local Place Plans will be formally recognised in the forthcoming Planning Bill albeit these plans are intended to be about spatial considerations and feed into the Local Development Planning process. This proposal is therefore in line with and would build on current policy thinking.

SCA May 2017

Author: Stephen Maxwell, View magazine

‘Community’ has become one of the most deceiving words in Scotland’s political lexicon. Community planning seemed to promise that local communities would take the lead in the planning of their own services. Instead it has defined communities as one voice among many more powerful voices, mainly from the public sector, in a process led by local authorities.

‘Community budgeting’ seemed to promise that communities would gain control of a budget of their own to spend on their priorities. Instead it turned out to be a process by which public authorities would disaggregate their spending in local communities to establish the size and bias of the overall spend; a useful ambition but not quite what seemed to be promised by the headline.

‘Community empowerment’ was the most deceiving of them all. It seemed to leave little scope for misunderstanding; communities were to be given the power to take decisions on their own account along With a capacity to implement them, But it turned out to mean that communities would be helped to contribute their views on local priorities and to present them to multi-sectoral structures, such as community planning partnerships,

Despite this serial misuse, the idea of empowering communities is too valuable to be discarded. To be sure, to make it fit for modern purpose the concept of community has to be stripped of some ideological baggage. The case for empowering communities does not depend on ‘communitarianism’, the belief that local communities operate as cohesive, self enforcing moral communities. In a multicultural society it can no longer be assumed that communities of place guarantee social solidarity around shared norms and values. Where different ethnic or religious communities, or even different age groups, live in dose proximity social conflict is as likely an outcome as social solidarity,

The case for empowerment is altogether more political and more practical. The United Kingdom has one of the most centralised political systems in the democratic world. David Miliband, the minister for communities and local government, recently confessed his surprise (itself surprising) at discovering that the lowest principal tier of local government in England is 10 times the size of the lowest tier in other countries, covering an average 150,000 people compared to around 50,000 in the United States, 30,000 in Sweden and 20,000 in Australia. While 36,000 communes serve a French population about10% larger than ours, and 15,000 municipalities cater for German population a third bigger, England makes do with three hundred and fifty local councils. Although the minister’s reference was England, the contrast applies equally to Scotland.

This centralisation of power is symptomatic of the weakness of democratic culture in the United Kingdom. We tolerate a voting system for our central Parliament which regularly gives parties gaining only minority share of the popular vote – at the last general election just 36% – an absolute majority of seats in Parliament. We accept a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty which gives the Executive in Parliament far greater discretion than in almost any other democracy. There is no written constitution to check Executive abuses, only statute created by and rescindable by the Parliament itself. There is no power of popular initiative or recall. Through party whips and centralised bureaucracies the political parties serve to extend rather than counterbalance this political centralisation. The powerlessness of local communities is part of the price Britain pays for its preference for the ‘forms’ of democracy over the substance.

Yet despite the rocky soil the idea of empowering local communities is making progress, at least south of the Border. At the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister David Miliband speaks of “looking at questions of power and ownership as the way of building community”. His menu of policy options now includes a community right to buy publicly held local assets analogous to tenants’ right to buy, the continued rolling out of Sure Start Children’s centres run by voluntary organisations, a neighbourhood policing team in every neighbourhood, mobilising local people ~s volunteers or part-time and sessional workers if) diversifying local service provision, a greater role for voluntary organisations in service delivery, giving local people a power to ‘trigger’ Changes in services or in local management of services if they feel they are not getting the quality of service they need, the further development of volunteer ‘time banks’, neighbourhood management, giving Councillors delegated budgets, and strengthening the powers of Parish Councils.

No Scottish minister has emulated David Miliband in presenting himself or herself as a Champion of community empowerment and service diversification apart from housing stock transfer. However, the Scottish Parliament did act as an early path-breaker through its legislation on a community right to purchase land. Building on this power, Scotland has gone on to pioneer community owned alternative energy. It is disappointing that despite the efforts of a few organisations such as the Caledonia Centre for Social Development these initiatives have not so far fertilised a wider Scottish interest in community empowerment. Instead, the focus in Scotland is on improving the effectiveness of community representation in partnerships. The National Standards for Community Engagement developed by the Scottish Centre for Community Development with funding from the Scottish Executive are typical of the Executive’s approach. If implemented systematically the National Standards will increase the public sector’s responsiveness to the needs of the local communities it serves while stopping well short of empowering communities to determine and act on their own priorities.

There’s no mystery about the sources of Scottish opposition to more radical forms of community empowerment. There is a continuing concern about the practicalities. There is a fear that local decision taking and spending would fall under the control of local cliques. There is a worry about maintaining national standards of public accountability for local decisions. There is certainly a worry about the cost of sustaining infrastructures for community decision taking alongside local councils and the parliaments in Holyrood, Westminster, and Brussels. There may be concern too that community-based decision taking would multiply post code differences in services.

Above all though, the opposition is political. Political institutions never willingly surrender power. Scotland’s focal councils are already on the defensive. They feel, rightly, that they have had too much of their power sliced away by central Government and they do not want even more to be handed down to neighbourhood bodies. They are supported by the public service unions which fear that radical decentralisation would further fragment and reduce their membership. The Labour party, forced by its coalition partner to introduce the single transferable vote (STV) for local elections, fears to alienate further the two institutions which have provided so much of their political ballast. And as rivals to Labour for the support of e the same constituency, the opposition SNP party has deferred to these fears rather than challenge them.

South of the Border David Miliband already has experts examining the practicalities of his new ‘localism’, including how to ensure local and national accountability. But perhaps his greatest challenge will be to keep localism distinct in the minds of left of centre opinion from some other themes of third term Labour, particularly the Prime Minister’s education reforms. In fact Blair’s school Trusts and competitive school admissions would work against community empowerment.

As both the Scottish record and Miliband’s menu illustrate, the term community empowerment accommodates many forms. But without a transfer of the power to take decisions and back them with money community empowerment will produce only meagre results. While communities of all kinds can benefit from power, disadvantaged communities should be the priority. Scotland’s one hundred most disadvantaged communities should n have the option of voting for ’empowered e community status. Subject to their meeting prescribed standards of local and national accountability they would be given a community budget extracted from the overall public – expenditure for their area. The budget would need to be sufficiently large to make a real difference wherever it was applied. For an average community size of say 7-8,000 residents, that would mean a budget initially of at .least one or two millions rather than the few £100,000s typically available to social inclusion partnerships. Only with a budget on this scale will community empowerment produce the local social ‘multipliers’, including attracting the best local leaders and building local skills and confidence, which over time could transform the community’s prospects.

So what are the values which support the case for direct community empowerment? Certainly not any vision of a culturally uniform local community. Community empowerment should develop firmly within the framework of enforceable rights which has been developed to maintain the freedoms of a culturally and ethnically diverse society. Democratic values certainly, in particular the belief that the best decisions are those taken by the people who are most exposed to their effects. A belief too in the beneficence of accountable power, in particular that self determination tends to promote responsibility and encourages invention and initiative. A belief that shared responsibility for producing a public good will encourage the growth of the practical skills of communication, representation, negotiation and compromise, and promote a tolerance of differing views. All of these are forms of social capital which do not presume that shared norms need stretch beyond maintaining a shared public space and process of decision taking. If in practice the experience of shared decision taking leads to the emergence of other shared values within the community, all the better.

There remains the question of whether local political community is consistent with the market values which drive wider society. For example, if the Government was to achieve its ambition for 80% of the working age population to be in paid employment, how much room would that leave for the social networks – familial, group and communal – on which community empowerment in the end depends? Localism may well prove to carry a more radical implication than many of its current advocates assume.

Author: Alan Simpson, The Herald

Owners of speedboats and 4×4’s across rural Scotland are joining up with fire- fighters to make their equipment and specialist knowledge available under a radical new scheme to help save lives.

People living in rural areas with specialist skills, vehicles or equipment are being invited to sign up to the innovative partnership to form a national database to deal with emergencies.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) has created a Community Asset Register (Car) and means volunteers can now be quickly identified.

The register can be activated by fire control rooms during a serious emergency, such as widespread flooding, to enhance the service’s response.

It will also be available to local authorities and the other emergency services.

The fire service said a number of volunteers with access to private vehicles that can be used to cross water or negotiate rough terrain have already signed up.

It is now issuing a rallying call to others in remote areas who have specialist skills or own an all-terrain vehicle to join the scheme and help protect their communities.

People with buildings that can offer a temporary base to emergency workers or warmth and shelter to people displaced from their homes are also being welcomed.

Bruce Farquharson, the area manager leading the project, said: “The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service exists to save lives and will always respond to every emergency with the right resources, in the right place – at the right time. But we always look for new and innovative, dynamic but nonetheless appropriate partnerships wherever possible to ensure the safety of our communities.

“The Community Asset Register is yet another example of this spirit, calling upon those with specialist skills, vehicles and equipment to work alongside ourselves to keep people safe – because sometimes minutes can be not only precious but vital.

“The ideal person is someone who is experienced and knowledgeable in their field and handling their equipment. We are talking about, for example, white water rafters, mountaineers and 4×4 enthusiasts, but there are other possibilities.

“These are everyday volunteers with a very keen community spirit – people who might also have access to useable buildings which can cater for large numbers of emergency personnel or displaced people in need of temporary warmth and shelter.

“We encourage anyone with these qualities who wish to give something back to their community to come forwards.”

Potential applicants will go through a “rigorous” registration process before being added to the live register and will have their equipment checked for safety.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is the largest within the UK and covers some of the UK’s most rural areas, such as the Highlands and Islands, Argyle and Bute and Dumfries and Galloway.

It is the latest scheme to help the emergency services deal with incidents in remote and inaccessible parts of the country.

Last week, firefighters reversed their ban on firefighters driving ambulances after the intervention of the head of NHS Scotland.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said it would act “as quickly as possible” to train staff to help out in rural areas.

It follows a firefighter driving a road crash victim to hospital in Shetland so two paramedics could continue treating him.

After the Shetland incident in August, victim John Gold, 50, who suffered multiple injuries including a collapsed lung, said the firefighter had saved his life, and outlawing the practice was “nonsense”.

Firefighters have also been deployed to resuscitate heart attack patients across rural Scotland in a move that has provided a major boost to survival rates.

Fire crews often arrive in advance of paramedics because there are more fire units than ambulances in remote areas. Specially trained firefighters administer CPR or use a defibrillator.

The average response time in the trial was six to eight minutes, giving the patient precious time until the ambulances crew arrived with their more sophisticated resources such as oxygen and incubation skills. The fire crews, with at least four members, often also help take turns with ambulances paramedics in delivering the physically demanding CPR.

Author: DAVID POWELL NEF

You don’t need to be an expert in adult social care to know that it’s in deep trouble. High-profile, distressing exposes like that from Panorama reveal a sector on the verge of –perhaps already in – full-blown crisis.

People are living longer. In the UK the number of people over the age of 85 is expected to double by 2030. Yet thanks to Government cuts and the dysfunctionality of our care system, council spending on adult social care in England fell 8% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2016-17. More funding from national Government is the obvious place to start. But take a look under the bonnet of the care system and you quickly find that it is in need of a major overhaul.  A fifth of all publicly funded care homes in the UK are provided by the five biggest private chain providers. As we found back in March, £115 million of every £2 billion of public spending on social care will disappear straight into the pockets of investors and shareholders in those five companies alone. This is classic ‘leaky bucket’ syndrome: money spent locally, to meet local needs, but which is siphoned off.

Yet there is a different way. After all, care is a major economic sector, employing 1.4 million people and contributing over £40 billion a year to the UK. Our aging population pretty much guarantees that care is a sector that will continue to grow over the years ahead. And with a new emphasis on industrial strategy, there are major win-wins from treating care not as a depressing ‘cost’ but instead to lavish it with the attention usually given only to shiny economic totems, like technology or pharmaceuticals. Care could get tens of thousands into work around the whole of a local economy – in a new generation of small, locally-rooted and highly valued community-scale providers.

In a new report written for Localise West Midlands, we look at a part of the country where 25,000 extra jobs will be needed by 2025 alone. The newly-constituted region’s approach to economic development has so far been largely defined by the GDP-first focus handed to it by the Treasury as part of its devolution deal: attracting export-led, high-end and glamorous industries. Yet we show that community-scale social care is well placed to help public money spent locally do far more good in local economies.

Instead of dominance by a handful of ‘too-big-to-fail’ care providers, we propose that the new Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, focuses on building a new ecology of community-scale care providers. The resilience of the sector as a whole would be sharply improved, as would the quality of care. The Care Quality Commission, which regulates social care in England, rated the quality of community-scale social care providers as the highest in the sector, and smaller homes as better than larger ones. It’s a natural gateway to a career rich with the potential for skills development, and is a sector well-suited to social enterprise. 86% of all of the social care enterprises in the West Midlands employ fewer than 50 people, and two-fifths employ fewer than five.

Encouragingly, Mr Street – once the boss of John Lewis – promised in his election pitch to give more priority to co-operatives, mutuals, and social enterprises. Our report gives him some ideas.  Smaller providers struggle to compete with massive private chains. They are better ‘value for money’ – keeping money flowing locally; delivering higher standards of care – but this can be hard to prove via labyrinthine commissioning processes. Leadership is needed to position smaller care models as a way to do far more than just meet needs – to help skills development, employment and wellbeing agendas right across the region. And local authorities like those in the West Midlands should go out of their way to help new models seed and thrive, with innovation funding and a major push to market careers in care to school and college leavers.

A focus on new models of care could be a win-win in difficult times. To be clear: none of this excuses the need for national Government to put a proper amount of funding into the system. But for pioneering local areas, care could be the engine of a new approach to economic development that starts from the needs of communities, not big investors – and which could provide jobs, skills, wellbeing and of course better care to the heart of the communities perpetually left behind by economic plans.

Author: Sandra Dick, The Herald

Author: Rob Edwards, The Ferret

The fish farming industry has admitted that it had to throw away up to ten million salmon last year – nearly a quarter of its stock – because of diseases, lice and other problems.

Official figures reveal the tonnages of dead fish disposed of has more than doubled from 10,599 in 2013 to a record high of 22,479 in 2016. Most are transported south to be burnt at an incinerator in Widnes near Warrington in northwest England.

Campaign groups warn that the industry is facing an “environment catastrophe”, is “haemorrhaging cash” and “shames Scotland”. Companies accept that they have been plagued by disease and sea lice, and that businesses have suffered.

Unwanted mortalities at salmon farms have long been a problem but in the last three years they have risen to record levels. There have been successive, significant increases in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Latest figures for the months up to June 2017 show another another 7700 tonnes of dead salmon, suggesting that the problem is not going away. On 9th October 2017 the BBC reported that “lorry loads” of dead salmon were being transported from Loch Eireasort on the Isle of Lewis after a bacterial infection.

The company suffering the biggest losses was Marine Harvest, headquartered in Norway, whose mortalities leapt threefold to 7609 tonnes between 2013 and 2016. Over the same period, the Scottish Salmon Company, which is registered in the Channel Islands, saw its dead fish more than double to 5873 tonnes.

Critics estimate the total number of dead, discarded salmon last year to have been between 10m and 20m. But the industry says it sustained losses of “between 6 and 10 million fish, depending on their size”.

Scottish Government figures show that in 2016 the total number of smolts – young salmon – put into fish farm production in Scotland was just under 43m. Total salmon production was 162,817 tonnes.

The Scottish Salmon Think-Tank, a new group of fish farm critics, accused the industry of failing to address “appalling” collateral damage. “Self-regulation is simply not working,” said the group’s Lynn Schweisfurth.

“The whole salmon farming business model is broken and far from sustainable as it claims to be. These worrying figures are the hallmarks of an industry in crisis and it’s our rural communities that will suffer as the problems continue.”

She urged next year’s parliamentary inquiry into fish farming to tackle the industry’s “systemic” problems. “Until they do, lorry loads of dead fish and the broader environmental and welfare issues that beset the industry will continue to shame Scotland.”

Dr Richard Luxmoore, senior nature conservation adviser for the National Trust for Scotland, described the disposal of huge amounts of rotting fish as “stomach churning” and a waste of good food. “It is the sign of an environmental catastrophe,” he said.

“The salmon farming industry has lost the ability to control fish diseases and this results in escalating quantities of toxic chemicals being poured into the sea in an increasingly fruitless attempt to control them. It also inevitably leads to the release of an infectious soup of disease organisms into our coastal waters.”

He called for the industry to shift to a “closed containment system” that would protect the fish and the marine environment. The same demand was made by the wild fish campaign group, Salmon and Trout Conservation Scotland.

“Disease and mortalities on Scottish salmon farms continue at shocking levels,” said the group’s Guy Linley-Adams. “What concerns us is that the Scottish Government has almost no idea what the effects are on wild salmon and wild sea trout in Scottish sea lochs.”

Don Staniford from the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture warned that plans to double the salmon farming business by 2030 were “environmental lunacy”. “Infectious diseases and lice infestation are crippling the Scottish salmon farming industry which is haemorrhaging cash,” he claimed.

The Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation (SSPO), which represents the industry, said there had “unfortunately” been losses. “Last year saw some problems which resulted in the loss of between 6 and 10 million fish, depending on their size,” said SSPO chief executive, Scott Landsburgh.

“This is something which the industry takes very seriously and is working hard to minimise. Disposal of mortalities is managed in line with the government’s approved methods and legislation.”

Marine Harvest insisted it had been “very transparent” about the issues it had been facing with sea lice and amoebic gill disease (AGD). “We would clearly prefer if we had not had this level of mortalities,” said the company’s business support manager, Steve Bracken.

“But what is more positive is that the picture is changing. We are making strong progress in reducing the sea lice levels and tackling the challenge of AGD.”

The Scottish Salmon Company agreed it had “biological challenges and unprecedented mortalities” in 2016. “We have taken decisive action to tackle these challenges,” said a company spokesperson.

The Scottish Government pointed out that fish and shellfish farming contributes £620m to the Scottish economy every year, supporting more than 12,000 jobs. “We have a duty to protect Scotland’s marine environment and the health and welfare of farmed fish is of utmost importance,” said a spokesperson.

“The Scottish Government is committed to working with the aquaculture sector to develop a strategic health framework that ensures we make progress in tackling major problems, including emerging disease and sea lice.”

Author: SCDC

Participation Requests

Summary Guidance for Community Participation Bodies Click here

Author: Extract from article by George Monbiot , The Guardian

There may be a case for one last hurrah for the old model: a technological shift that resembles the Second World War’s military Keynesianism. In 1941, the US turned the entire civilian economy around on a dime: within months, car manufacturers were producing planes, tanks and ammunition. A determined government could do something similar in response to climate breakdown: a sudden transformation, replacing our fossil economy. But having effected such a conversion, it should, I believe, then begin the switch to a different economic model.

The new approach could start with the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. There is not enough physical or environmental space for everyone to enjoy private luxury: if everyone in London acquired a tennis court, a swimming pool, a garden and a private art collection, the city would cover England. Private luxury shuts down space, creating deprivation. But magnificent public amenities – wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks – create more space for everyone, at a fraction of the cost.

Wherever possible, I believe such assets should be owned and managed by neither state nor market, but by communities, in the form of commons. A commons in its true form is a non-capitalist system, in which a resource is controlled in perpetuity by a community, for the shared and equal benefit of its members. A possible model is the commons transition plan commissioned by the Flemish city of Ghent.

Land value taxation also has transformative potential. It can keep the income currently siphoned out of our pockets in the form of rent – then out of the country and into tax havens – within our hands. It can reduce land values, bringing down house prices. While local and national government should use some of the money to fund public services, the residue can be returned to communities.

Couple this with a community right to buy, enabling communities to use this money to acquire their own land, with local commons trusts that possess powers to assemble building sites, and with a new right for prospective buyers and tenants to plan their own estates, and exciting things begin to happen. This could be a formula for meeting housing need, delivering public luxury and greatly enhancing the sense of community, self-reliance and taking back control. It helps to create what I call the Politics of Belonging.

But it doesn’t stop there. The rents accruing to commons trusts could be used to create a local version of the citizens’ wealth funds (modelled on the sovereign wealth funds in Alaska and Norway) proposed by Angela Cummine and Stewart Lansley. The gain from such funds could be distributed in the form of a local basic income.

And the money the government still invests? To the greatest extent possible, I believe it should be controlled by participatory budgeting. In the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, the infrastructure budget is allocated by the people: around 50,000 citizens typically participate. The results – better water, sanitation, health, schools and nurseries – have been so spectacular that large numbers of people now lobby the city council to raise their taxes. When you control the budget, you can see the point of public investment.

In countries like the UK, we could not only adopt this model, but extend it beyond the local infrastructure budget to other forms of local and even national spending. The principle of subsidiarity – devolving powers to the smallest political unit that can reasonably discharge them – makes such wider democratic control more feasible.

All this would be framed within a system such as Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics which, instead of seeking to maximise growth, sets a lower bound of wellbeing below which no one should fall, and an upper bound of environmental limits, that economic life should not transgress. A participatory economics could be accompanied by participatory politics, involving radical devolution and a fine-grained democratic control over the decisions affecting our lives – but I will leave that for another column.

Who could lead this global shift? It could be the UK Labour Party. It is actively seeking new ideas. It knows that the bigger the change it offers, the greater the commitment of the volunteers on which its insurgency relies: the Big Organising model that transformed Labour’s fortunes at the last election requires a big political offer. (This is why Ed Miliband’s attempts to create a grassroots uprising failed).

Could Labour be the party that brings the long 20th Century to an end? I believe, despite its Keynesian heritage, it could. Now, more than at any other time in the past few decades, it has a chance to change the world.